Survey of interfaces and visualizations of complex networks

CNN Ecosphere

The CNN Ecosphere is an interactive visualization of tweets about the COP17 Conference on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa. Tweets with the hashtag #COP17 are organized in threedimensional trees around a globe. The different discussed topics are split into different trees with each tweet being a leaf in the tree. Depending on how the discussion develops over time, growth in the trees is stimulated more or less. By clicking and dragging the globe and the trees can be turned around. There is a timeline slider at the bottom to select a certain day in the past. Also, Different topics can be selected at the bottom. Clicking them automatically zooms in to these trees. When a tree is zoomed in, the each tweet can be read by hovering over the leaves.
While the visualization is quite impressive and beautiful, the interface is very limited and the overall performance of the app is rather slow.